I am an O/L student studying in St. Patrick’s College, Talawakelle. It is about to complete eleven years of
my school life since 2011. This School is very special to me, because I have learnt a lot and gained a wide
knowledge about the world, about the life which are essential for today. From the day I joined this school,
each and everything that I see here inspires me a lot. The important things that I learnt here are good
behaviours, good attitudes and mainly discipline.

Rev. Fr. Marion Lenard was there as the principal, when I came here. The way he welcomed us together
with the teachers was surprising and gave us confidence and energy, also it is been continued until now.
In 2018 Rev. Fr. Dominic Sandanam was appointed as our school principal. He always motivates us and
he is giving his best to the School. According to our Mission and Vision, we work so hard as a team to
produce well-disciplined and responsible future citizens of Sri Lanka and to develop the skills of the
students in order to uplift their life.

The best thing that is followed here is encouraging the students with tons of love, care and efforts. Here
the principal and the teachers work more hard than the students to produce good results and to uplift their
knowledge. Beyond studies, our physical skills are improved too and we got several opportunities to show
out our talents in the past ten years. Such occasions are Drama Competitions, Inter-house sports meets,
Karate classes, performing School Band, English and Tamil Competitions, Maths quiz competitions,
English and Tamil Associations programs which are held every month, Art Competitions and even more.
We organized many programmes along with the help of our principal. We can express our talents and
skills in such instances without any fear, because we gain full support and help from our teachers and
principal. St. Patrick’s College is a great platform to reveal our secret abilities. Only because of these
Covid pandemic issues, we couldn’t participate and conduct any of these programmes. Even though, our
school head helped us a lot to engage in online competitions through internet.

We have won many competitions successfully as a school, as one team and we received countless
certificates and trophies which are awarded for our sincere work. Recently, our school has been taken
place among the 50 best schools in the Central Province and it has been numbered as one in Division II,
Nuwara Eliya Zone according to the recent O/L result analysis of 2020 batch and I surely know that our
college will achieve much more in future.

At the beginning when I came here, there was a single building with a ground and we had only a small
road to go to our school, but now there are two buildings, two ways to School (through road which is
widened now, through steps) and also our St. Patrick’s Church, which is in front of our school, has been
reconstructed. Our college is improving day by day due to the development projects which are
implemented by our principal. We got many new books to the library to boost up our knowledge, more
sport equipments, more equipments for Science lab and computers to the computer lab. There were many
constructions that had been built for safety too. We have Tamil medium from grade one to thirteen and
Bilingual medium (Tamil and English) from grade six to eleven. We started Bilingual medium since 2016
and we are the first batch to sit for O/L exams & it is such a blessing.

Our teachers and principal not only work hard to gain good results, also in order to make the students
happy and to enjoy our school life. We usually have College Day, Teachers’ Day, Children’s Day
celebrations, Christmas Carols, Annual Prize Giving and many more. The staffs really try their best to
give us pleasure and to feel good. We as students actually enjoy these kind of celebrations along with our
school, which is our family.

I will really miss my school after finishing my O/L examinations, because this united family has given
me a lot of memories with friends, principal and teachers. I feel very proud whenever, I wear my school
tie and uniform. I’m so grateful to my school, my mother, for all that she has given me. We are extremely
working hard in order to produce good results in our exams with the help our principal and teachers. We
will definitely achieve it. I would say that St. Patrick’s College is the greatest gift that God has given me.

Thank you.

—Student Y.Dhivashini ( O/L 2021 )